You're at your desk at work, quietly plugging away on the new account, minding your own business. In the cubicle next to you a coworker gets buzzed, "Phone call on line three." He picks up the phone, offers his customary salutation, "This is Richard," - everything is normal, right? Then suddenly, a new Richard emerges. Same guy, sure - but this voice?
This soft, sweet voice of patient understanding, this mysterious coo of peace and saccharine, it is indeed a curious and confounded thing. Suddenly you understand: your coworker is on the phone with his wife - this is wife voice.
Wife voice isn’t always reserved to a wife; girlfriends, small children, and even drinking buddies get it from time to time. Nor is it reserved only for public situations like work. Go hang out with a guy friend while his wife or girlfriend is out of town and wait for the call from his significant other – it will be unmistakable.
Wife voice occurs for various reasons, but the most prevalent reason is that any conversation with your wife (or significant other), no matter how private, is a rather personal and intimate time. Even if your wife has called to tell you that the plumber has arrived, and is "unpacking his tools", and you wonder what that's supposed to mean, this is a personal time, and wife voice must be respected.
If you listen carefully to wife voice you can even make an educated guess as to how long the speaker has been married; that is, with this piece of information: The longer someone has been married, the more agreeable wife voice becomes until it spreads beyond tone into words. You can assume each agreeable word consecutively occurring represents ten years of marriage. “Yes ... yes ... yes, honey ... yes.” How long has this man been married? If you said thirty years, congratulation!
thanks to kthejoker for his help with punching this up!